Glaxo Smith Kline's Active Science offers fifteen interactive games covering a range of science topics. There are games appropriate for elementary school, middle school, and high school students. The games for younger students appear at the topic of the Active Science list and the games for older students are at the bottom of the list. Active Science is a nice collection of games that unlike a lot of games are not simple drill activities.
The Interactive Periodic Table is a game designed to help chemistry students practice identification of the elements. To play the game students are given some clues about an element's properties. Using those clues the student has to place the element in the correct place on the table. Study Stack is one of the better review game creation tools that I've tried. Study Stack allows teachers and students to create flashcards, crossword puzzles, matching games, word searches, and other classic study games for any subject area. You can create a game using any type of numerical or text data. Once you're data is in your account, you can use that data to create multiple games.. All of these games can be shared via email or embedded into your blog or website. Sharendipity makes it possible for students and teachers to quickly create and share simple video games. Sharendipity's drag and drop creation tools can be used to create a game in as few as four steps. For new Sharendipity users the tutorials provide clear directions and helpful game ideas. Games created on Sharendipity can be embedded in your blog or website. ClassTools.net is a free service teachers can use to create their own educational games. Games made on ClassTools.net can be shared via email or embedded into a blog or website. ClassTools.net provides fifteen easy to use templates with which teachers can make educational games for their students. There are also pre-made games on ClassTools.net which teachers will find useful. ProProfs Brain Games allows you to build interactive crossword puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, word searches, hangman games, and sliding puzzle games. The games you create can be embedded into your blog or shared via email, Twitter, Facebook, or Myspace. If you don't want to take the time to create your own game, you can browse the gallery of games. All of the games in gallery can be embedded into your blog. Purpose Games is a free service that allows users to create custom games, share games, and play games. There are two styles of games that you can create and play on Purpose Games. The simpler of the two styles is a fairly basic multiple choice game. The other style uses images and maps on which players have to name the places represented by placemarks on the image or map. For an example, try this game about the skeletal system. Purpose Games gives game creators the option to make their games public or private. If you select the private option, only the people to whom you send invitations will be able to play your game
NASA has an excellent interactive timeline tracing the history of astronomy and space exploration from the Greek philosophers through today. Planet Quest is actually three timelines combined into one. The three timelines cover technology, discovery, and culture as it relates to astronomy and space exploration. Each element on the timeline is narrated. You can select individual elements on the timeline or choose autoplay to hear the narration of each item in sequence.
Applications for Education Planet Quest provides a good overview of the history of astronomy and space exploration. The culture element could provide an interesting way to engage students who aren't excited about science, but are interested in what people thought at various times in history.
Science Netlinks offers dozens of lesson plans and online learning activities. The lessons and activities are cover a wide variety of science topics. All of the lesson plans are sorted by grade level (US), but you can also sort the lesson plans by science benchmark standards. A series of icons also indicates if each lesson plan has a printable worksheet, e-worksheet, or is an interactive experience.
Applications for Education Science Netlinks provides a collection of lesson plans aligned to the benchmarks for Science Literacy. In addition to lesson plans, Science Netlinks offers a selection of reviewed resource websites for K-12 science teachers.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum offers thirteen online activities for use in art and history classes. The activities range from topics like Cleopatra Lost and Found to Picturing the 1930's to Exploring Whitehouse Craft.
In Picturing the 1930's students can walk through a virtual museum exploring paintings, documents, music, and film. While walking through the virtual museum students will be greeted by "tour guides" who will explain various aspects of the exhibit. The virtual museum is easy to navigate by using the arrows at the bottom of the screen or clicking through doorways. After exploring the art work in the virtual museum, students can create their own documentary-style film using images, text, and narration using the Picturing the 1930's film editor. Google Tutor (not officially connected with Google) offers an extensive collections of tutorials and tips from simple tasks like recovering your forgotten Google Account password to more difficult tasks like creating charts in Google Docs or modifying Google Chrome to suit your tastes.
Applications for Education Google Tutor is a good place to find clear tutorials for improving your and your students' experience with Google's services.
Teachers' Domain is another place to find subject-related video content, but the real purpose of this website is to provide lesson plans and activities to match the media content.
Teachers' Domain offers lesson plans and activities for K-12 divided into five content categories. To help you narrow your search for lessons, the five categories, arts, language arts, science, mathematics, and social studies are divided into subcategories.
Mixed Ink is a collaborative writing tool that is best described as one part wiki, one part Google Docs, and one part polling system. It's designed for use by a community of people to develop mission statements, open letters, and other policy statements. It offers a collaborative writing platform that includes revisions along the side of the writing tablet. This allows everyone to quickly see who edited what. This is an advantage over Google Docs or a wiki where you have to change pages to see revisions. Mixed Ink also allows you to vote or rate the revisions that have been made to a document. After starting a topic the link to it can be provided to nominated members of your group (by email) and/or linked to a group website.
Watch Know is a new source of educational videos. Watch Know is a collection of thousands of educational videos from across the Internet, broken down the collection into an easy-to-browse catalog. You can also use a standard search box to find videos. Although the site is gathering videos from all across the web from sites like National Geographic, many of the videos are drawn from YouTube.
Playing History is a collection of 128 games related to topics in US and World History as well as civics and geography. The games come from a variety of sources across the web. Visitors can search for games by using the tag cloud, by using the search box, or just browse through the entire list. Applications for Education Playing History offers educational games for use in elementary, middle, and high school social studies course. Find a game that matches your curriculum and add it to your classroom website or blog to provide your students with review activity that they can use at home or at school.
Interactivate is a suite of fifty-nine interactive mathematics assessments. These assessments allow users to track their percentage of correct and incorrect responses on each activity. Most assessments are designed for individual use although there are some activities that can be used by multiple users.
Applications for Education Most of the assessments on Interactivate are appropriate for middle school and high school use. The assessments could be used at the beginning of a course to assess your students' prior knowledge. The assessments could also be used to check for comprehension at the conclussion of a day's lesson.
Project Look Sharp, created as part of an initiative sponsored by Ithaca College, is a collection of ten comprehensive curriculum units for teaching media literacy. Eight of the units are geared toward to middle school and high school use. Two of the units are designed for elementary school use. With in each unit there are three to five comprehensive lesson plans. The lessons include videos, slideshows, worksheets, and teacher guides. To work through each lesson plan will take at least two days. Some of the topics that this curriculum units address include Presidential campaigns, use of media in the former Soviet Union, and endangered species.
Applications for Education Project Look Sharp could be used in social studies, media arts, and science courses. For example the curriculum for endangered species could easily overlap between science and social studies.
MyStudiyo provides a way to make a multimedia quiz for your website or blog. You can include video, audio, and image file in your quiz. Each question in your quiz can have a different media format. There are two options for answer format, multiple choice or open-ended response. Quizzes are easy to create and easy to embed into a website or blog.
Applications for Education The quizzes are completely customizable and useful for any content area or grade level. You write the questions and the answer choices therefore the content and difficulty of a quiz is up to you to determine. The ability to integrate multimedia clues in your quiz helps to address the needs of a variety of learning styles.
XP Mathis a place to find math games, math videos, math worksheets, and math e-books. The games section offers games for basic arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and probability. Create an account and you can keep track of your scores. In the teacher resources section you can find eleven e-books about teaching mathematics. The highlight of the XP Math worksheets is 1001 Math Problems. The video section offers three videos, two of which are divided into six to ten segments a piece. These videos are geared toward an elementary and middle school audience.
Applications for Education XP Math is a resource for locating mathematics activities that students can use on their own. The games section allows students to record their scores to measure their progress. The teacher resource and worksheet sections provide mathematics teachers with activities they can use when they can't get their students online.
Visuwords uses a web design to show users the definitions of words and the connections between words. Just type a word into the search box to generate a web of related words. Place your cursor over any of the words and the definition appears. Use the color-coded key to understand the connections between the words in any web.Visuwords gives students an easy-to-use tool for exploring definitions and alternative word choices.
Study Spanish is a good resource for locating Spanish language instruction and practice quizzes. Not all of this site is free, but there is enough free material to make it useful, as a good supplementary resource, particularly for those schools that do not have a spanish specialist.
Students can access free accounts in which they can read tutorial materials and then test their new knowledge on free quizzes and keep track of the items they did and did not know. Teachers can create free accounts to monitor the progress of their students.
Mudd Math Fun Facts has an easy to search database of maths facts designed to stimulate thought and make students look at mathematics in a different light. Each fun fact is accompanied by a problem, diagram, and short explanation of a fun mathematics concept.
eMathematics.net looks like it could be a very good online learning resource for mathematics students and teachers. Students can learn and practice mathematics skills and can create an account to keep a record of the exercise they successfully completed.
Teachers can create accounts for their students and monitor progress to identify their students' strengths and weaknesses. Teachers can also use the site to communicate with students through email.
There are lessons and practice excercises for pre-Algebra, Algebra, Geometry, and Trigonmetry.
Applications for Education eMathematics looks like a good resource for students to get supplemental mathematics instruction online and may be a good resource for students to use to keep their mathematics skills sharp.
National Geographic may just be my favorite website on the web. Every time I visit the site I find something that I didn't see on my previous visit. Today was not an exception to that pattern.
National Geographic's Atlas Jigsaw Puzzles challenge players to assemble the continents as quickly as they can. There are puzzles based on every continent based on political and physical maps. In all there are twenty-three puzzles.
Applications for Education National Geographic's Atlas Jigsaw Puzzles could be a fun way for students to sharpen their knowledge of world geography one puzzle at a time.
NeoK12 is a collection of educational videos for science, math, social studies, and language arts. Each category is subdivided by topic. Most of the videos come from YouTube or Metacafe. You could find these videos yourself on YouTube, but NeoK12 saves you time through their categorization of videos.
Applications for Education Most of the videos on NeoK12 come from YouTube which may be a problem for those who work in school districts where YouTube is blocked. If YouTube is not blocked in your school, NeoK12 could be a valuable time-saver in your search for educational videos.
Xtra Normal is a unique service that enables students to create animated, narrated movies just by typing the dialogue then dragging and dropping characters and set elements into the movies. There are free and paid plans for using Xtra Normal. The primary difference between the plans being that the paid plan offers more options for the setting of your story. The standard plan should be more than adequate for most academic applications.
Applications for Education Xtra Normal could be a great way for students to create animated digital stories for most content areas. This example has students getting ready for a science lesson.
LMK Life Online is a website created for the purpose of educating girls about online safety. LMK Life Online is sponsored by the Girl Scouts and Microsoft. On the site girls can learn through articles and videos about protecting themselves from online predators. Girls will also find lessons about cyberbullying and online privacy. After reading the articles and watching the videos, girls can test their knowledge through interactive quizzes.
Applications for Education LMK Life Online is a good place for girls to learn about protecting themselves while online. This is a site that I would recommend to parents who are looking for materials to teach their daughters about online safety.
Story Top is a web-based tool for creating digital stories and comics. It features an easy-to-use drag and drop tool for creating your story. Simply select your background, characters, and text bubbles from the menu and drag them into your story box. After selecting the basic story elements you can then add additional elements like plants, animals, and vehicles. When your story is complete you can save it in your account or send it to friend. You can also share your story with a group of other users.
Applications for Education Story Top is a good tool for getting students online and creating stories quickly. The user interface is easy to use and offers just enough features to allow students to create digital comics.
Teachers First provides lesson plan resources to teachers of all K-12 content areas. Additionally, there are teaching ideas and practical tips for classroom teachers. One such resource is their guide Blog Basics for the Classroom which is designed to provide guidance to teachers creating classroom blogs for the first time. This guide starts with an explanation of what a blog is, provides many suggestions for using a classroom blog, and concludes with step-by-step explanations for setting up a blog.
The Science and Technology of World War II is an interactive website provided by The National World War II Museum with funding support from General Electric. It provides students and teachers with lesson plans, timelines, essays, images, and learning activities about the scientific and technological developments that took place during WWII.
The darkroom section of the website contains thirteen categories of images of WWII scientific and technology developments. The timeline on the website allows students to explore the scientific, technological, and political steps in the development of the atomic bomb. The learning activities section gives students the opportunity to learn about and send coded messages.
Applications for Education This site provides teachers with four lesson plans that incorporate elements of science, math, technology, and history. The lesson plans are appropriate for middle school and high school use. After completing the activities in the lesson plans students can test their knowledge using the quiz in the learning activities section.
Wikipedia for Schools is a checked, static version of thousands of Wikipedia articles. The articles have been checked for accuracy and suitability for school use and can be viewed online or downloaded as a complete volume for offline use. Applications for Education Wikipedia for Schools could be a good reference resource for teachers who are reluctant to allow students to use Wikipedia for research. Being able to download the entire contents enables students to access the information regardless of Internet access
The File Cabinet is a wiki created for K-8 teachers that has links and resources for K-8 teachers organized by topic and grade level.
The World Digital Library makes available, for free, nearly 1200 primary documents and images from collections around the world. Sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the mission is to promote the study and understanding of cultures. The library can be searched by date, era, country, continent, topic, and type of resource or by clicking through the map on the homepage.
Applications for Education The World Digital Library is a resource for anyone that teaches history or cultural studies. The wealth of image based resources along with the document based resources makes the WDL appropriate for use with most age groups. Unfortunately, it’s just beginning. The whole library, hosted by the US Library of Congress, has holdings in English from the dates 8000BC and to now has 1170 items. There are only eleven documents from Australia, and three from New Zealand.
PBS Video offers videos from the most popular shows including Frontline, NOVA, Nature, and American Experience. For the younger crowd, PBS Kids offers videos as well. If you're not sure what you're looking for, but you think PBS has an appropriate video you can search the PBS Video center by topic. Applications for Education PBS has long been a great source of educational programming and many schools have old video tapes that are in need of renewal.
Some of the longer videos, like those from NOVA, are broken into chapters which makes it easier to show just a portion of video to a class rather than an entire episode.
Planet Impact is an interactive activity that lets students launch comets at Jupiter to study the effects of speed, mass, and gravity on the trajectory of a comet. Students can change each of these variables, launch the comet, then read about the effects of changing each variable. Planet Impact is one of eleven good interactive activities developed by Amazing Space.
Applications for Education
The activities are appropriate for use in middle school and upper elementary school grades and there are suggested lesson plans with each interactive activity.
Stop Disasters is a game designed for students to learn about natural disasters, disaster prevention, and city design. There are five game scenarios that students can play. Students can plan to prepare for hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, wildfires, and tsunamis. The scenarios are set in geographically accurate contexts of Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Caribbean.There are fact sheets to distribute to students about each type of natural disaster and teaching guides, lesson plan ideas, and links to additional reference materials.
Applications for Education Stop Disasters could be used by geography teachers and Earth science teachers and in order to be successful in this game students have to have knowledge of geography concepts and Earth science concepts.
The Wild Classroom features a collection of podcasts and videos for science classrooms. For example, Biomes of the World Map. The Biomes of the World map allows students to explore the map and watch an informational video about each biome. Applications for Education The Wild Classroom is an informative place for students to explore biology concepts. The lesson plan section of The Wild Classroom is sparse right now, therefore The Wild Classroom is seeking contributions from teachers.
Caption Tube is a new service designed to make captioning YouTube videos an easier and more accurate process. You can create captions for your own videos or for any other video that you find on YouTube. The editing tools include a timeline to help you match your video's images to the captions that you create. You can choose the duration of time for which each caption is displayed. Applications for Education Caption Tube could be great tools for foreign language teachers, ESL/ EFL teachers, and teachers of students with hearing impairments. Foreign Language teachers could have students find their favorite short YouTube videos or TeacherTube videos to transcribe into the language that they are studying.
Visualizing Cultures is an interesting project created and developed at MIT that consists of thirteen visual narratives accompanied by essays. The project combines visual narratives and essays to tell the history of Japan since the arrival of Commodore Perry or as MIT describes it, the history of Japan in the modern world. The essays can be read on the website or downloaded as PDF's for printing. Each visual narrative consists of several sections, each section consists of ten to fifteen images with captions. In some ways this site could be described as an academic picture book.
Applications for Education Visualizing Cultures could be used at a wide range of grade levels. The essays could be used in a high school history class and the visual narratives could be used in a middle school or possibly elementary school class.
provides model for students to use as they create visual narratives of their own. According to the website, Visualizing Cultures has plans to add visual narratives about China.
ProCon looks like it could be a great resource for anyone that teaches current events, political science, or public policy. It takes controversial current topics, posts a "core question" about the topic, provides an overview of the topic, and provides background information on the controversial topic. Then
ProCon presents short articles and news quotes from both sides of the "core question" and provides students with a balanced look at controversial topics such as Illegal Immigration, Euthenasia, bailouts of big corporations and categrorizes topics as Business, Politics, Science, Health, Law, Religion, Sex & Gender, and Sports.
Applications for Education ProCon's mission statement claims that its purpose is to "promote critical thinking skills, education, and informed citizenship." It does a good job of providing balanced information that could help students make informed decisions, and could be a good reference for students who are participating in debates or writing persuasive essays on controversial topics.
Fling the Teacher is a website containing 68 history quiz games. All of the quizzes have at least fifteen questions and a few of the games have more than 100 questions. The average is 30-45 questions per quiz. Prior to starting each quiz game students can create their own custom game character.
If you are a Windows user you can download, for free, the Fling the Teacher Content Generator which allows you to create your own versions of Fling the Teacher. Applications for Education The quiz games on Fling the Teacher are primarily about topics in European History and you can locate quizzes by topic or by age group.
The World Digital Library will launch on April 21, 2009.
The World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.
EtherPad might just be one of the most useful web apps we have seen in quite a while. EtherPad allows you to instantly create a workspace for text documents that you can then share with anyone. Every edit to the document will immediately appear on everyone's screens in real-time. No sign up and instant save make this a really quick way for groups to collaborate. Etherpad avoids the over-typing issue of wikis and could be a great way to brainstorm topics. Save the resulting page and then paste it into the wiki for for considered editing/additions.
PE Zone is one of the better web resources for physical education teachers. It offers lesson plans, slideshows, videos, and podcasts for physical education teachers to use in their courses. The lessons are divided by activity and age group.
Applications for Education PE Zone is a good resource for physical education and health teachers. PE Zone also offers a list of blogs and RSS feeds to help teachers find even more resources for physical education.
The Physics Classroom offers detailed tutorials on thirteen different physics topics including waves, static electricity, Newton's laws, and vectors. In addition to the written tutorials there are 50 animations and 6 videos demonstrating physics concepts.
Applications for Education The Physics Classroom could be a very good resource for high school physics teachers and their students. The animations in particular could be very helpful to students that learn concepts better when they can see those concepts in action.
Shmoop, a provider of online Literature and History study guides has just announced the addition of twenty more great study guides. The new study guides cover topics in US History and Literature. The additions to the literature section includes guides for works by Melville, Hemingway, Wilde, Salinger, Eliot, and Shakespeare. The new additions to the history section include study guides for the Gilded Age and the development of labor unions.
Applications for Education Shmoop's literature guides provide good depth of information without providing so much depth that students would be tempted to just use the review guides instead of actually doing their assigned readings
World of Teaching is a website of free power point slide shows for wide variety of subject areas and grade levels. The homepage features the most recent additions. All of the slide shows are organized by subject area. Each slide show is available as a free download. Applications for Education World of Teaching could be a great website to have up your sleeve when you don't have time to build a slideshow or they could also be good resources to look through for ideas for creating your own slideshows.
Lite Type is a virtual keyboard that allows you type and search the web in your choice of 53 different languages. To use select a language and begin typing. Lite Type displays a keyboard that shows you what each key on your computer's keyboard will generate. The keyboard key is displayed directly below the box in which your typed text appears.
There are also some convenient features like integrated search for images, videos, and websites and an integrated multilingual dictionary.
Click the "remove ads" link and all of that advertising disappears.
Applications for Education Lite Type could be a great resource for foreign language teachers and students. It removes the struggle of trying to figure out which keys do what when trying to type in a foreign language.
Dr. Saul's Biology in Motion features fantastic interactive activities and animations for students to use to learn human biology concepts. The activities and animations seem to be targeted toward a middle school audience there is a lot of value in Biology in Motion for high school students too. Biology in Motion offers some good tips for teachers planning to use these activities in the classroom. Most of the tips are things that might seem obvious, but are good reminders none-the-less.
Applications for Education Dr. Saul's Biology in Motion provides fun and educational activities and animations appropriate for middle school and high school science classes.
Mind 360 features at least eighteen free brain training games that range in difficulty and in task from simple matching games to more difficult logic and reasoning games. You can play the games individually or challenge another Mind 360 user to a game. If you play often, you can track your game scores and progress in your Mind 360 profile.
Applications for Education Mind 360 could be a good website for students to use during a downtime in your class or during a study hall period. The games themselves might be difficult to build a lesson plan around, but the skills that students could develop while playing the games do have value.
Fun 4 The Brain is a great website offering math, science, and English games. The games all have an audio element to them, clear graphics, and provide instant feedback for each question or problem.
Applications for Education
Overall, the games are great for elementary school and middle school students. Review games keep students engaged in learning.
Voice Thread is a great tool for hosting online conversations about pictures and or documents. Voice Thread can be used to connect classrooms around the world to create a global conversation.
On Board the Titanic - Virtual Vield Trip On Board the Titanic is a virtual field trip produced by Discovery. To take the field trip students select one of five characters to be as they set sail on the Titanic. When selecting a character the students do not know who they are or if they will survive until the night of the sinking. Students will spend four or five virtual days learning about the ship and their character. Only on the night of April 15, 1912 do they learn who they are and if they will survive.
Applications for Education On Board the Titanic is a good resource for elementary and middle school students learning about the Titanic. It could be used as part of a larger lesson on early 20th century history. After taking the virtual field trip an extension activity could be to have students invent a character and write their own story about the Titanic.
Snag Films is a great place to find full-length documentary films. The site has a National Geographic section offering more than 60 full-length documentaries for free viewing. All of these videos can be watched on the Snag Films website or "snagged" and embedded into your blog or website.
Next Vista is an academic video sharing site that has three video categories. The Light Bulbs category is for videos that teach you how to do something and or provides an explanation of a topic. The Global Views video category contains videos created to promote understanding of cultures around the world. The Seeing Service video category highlights the work of people who are working to make a difference in the lives of others. All videos are screened for inappropriate and inaccurate content.
Applications for Education A good classroom project could be to have students create videos to contribute to Next Vista. All videos can be embedded into your blog or website. The videos can also be downloaded directly from Next Vista. The download option is great for teachers that work in schools that have very restrictive web filters.
Math Graphing has links to 45 interactive graphing activities appropriate for elementary school and middle school use.
If you're looking for other mathematics activities, check out this general math page which is divided into fourteen categories including fractions, flashcards, integers, telling time, algebra, and geometry.
Math and Reading Help for Kids.has a small collection of problem solving and logic games that could be good for elementary school and possibly middle school use. The tasks that the games ask students to perform include identifying differences between objects, moving shapes to solve simple logic problems, and typing accurately.There are some good articles about and tutorials for helping kids learn reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Applications for Education The games are best suited to use by elementary school students although there may be some cases in which middle school students could benefit from the games.
Here are two interactive mathematics activities websites. The first website, Interactive Algebra provides fourteen Algebra lessons divided into three units. To use Interactive Algebra simply choose a lesson and start trying the randomly generated problems. After trying each problem the correct answer and an explanation is provided.
The Eyeballing Game is an interactive visual estimation game. Players are presented with a drawing or a line segment, angle, or shape. Players are then given a task like "find the spot equidistant to all sides" or "bisect the angle."
Applications for Education Both of the games mentioned above could be good mathematics practice activities that students can use independently. Both activities are worth considering as resources to link to your class blog or wiki.
Grammar Bytes is a great website for Language Arts teachers that offers teachers and students a glossary of terms, handouts, interactive exercises, and slide show presentations. There are eighteen slide show presentations available for free download. Each slide show is accompanied by a handout for students to complete as they view each presentation.
The interactive activities require students to read sentences and identify errors. In some of the activities students have to correct errors in a sentence. Each interactive activity is accompanied by a handout on which students can record their scores and measure their progress.
Applications for Education The design and content of Grammar Bytes makes it a good resource for students and teachers.
This wiki is called Teaching With Ted. The pages of are organized to feature a TED Talk(s) followed by links to related resources and ideas for teaching the concepts/ideas discussed in the TED Talk video. For example, there is a wiki page featuring Jill Bolte's talk about brain science and strokes. Following the video is a link to a page of activities about neuroscience.
Applications for Education Teaching With TED is a good place to find thought provoking videos and discussion questions for use in your classroom. Teaching With TED is a wiki so if you have ideas about teaching with TED Talks submit your suggestions.
The Periodic Table of Visualisation Methods
The Periodic Table of Visualization Methods is a great chart that displays ideas for creating visualization charts. It is divided into six categories of visualization types; data, strategy, information, metaphor, concept, and compound visualization. If you're not sure which type of visualization chart to create, explanations of each are provided by Visual-Literacy.org.
Applications for Education The Periodic Table of Visualization Methods could be a great reference when you're trying to create graphic organizers appropriate for your content and students. This is also a great reference for students trying to find the best way to present and share their knowledge and or research findings.
Top Marks is a search engine for educational resources designed for busy teachers in need of a quick way to find classroom activities. You can search for resources by subject area and grade level (based in the UK so you do need to have a basic familiarity with Key Stage levels in order to find age appropriate resources). Those teachers who have an interactive whiteboard will want to explore the section dedicated to interactive whiteboard activities.
Drop.io has unveiled live chat which will allow users to host conversations about documents, slideshows, or any other media that has been uploaded. The other improvement lies in the stream or list of media that you upload. Newly uploaded media should now appear without the need refresh your page as you had to in the past in order for the most recent uploads and edits to appear. You can host copies of documents and assignments for students to access or students can use Drop.io to create digital portfolios. Applications for Education The live chat option could be very useful for those times when your students are at home looking at an assignment you've posted and need clarification. You could chat with them about the assignment or they could chat with one of their classmates about the assignment.
Using Know the News students can grab news clips from Link TV's library of news and mix them together to create a unique news show. Link TV's news library contains segments from major news outlets around the world. The process of creating a news video is fairly straight-forward. Watch and select video clips to place on a timeline, organize the clips through a drag and drop feature, then add text narrations using the video text editor. After previewing the video it can be published on their network. To see examples of academic uses of the Know the News video editor, visit the Know the News wiki.
Applications for Education
Provides teachers with a tool for teaching lessons about media bias, accuracy in news reporting, and global perspectives of an event.
The terms of service require users to be at least thirteen years old. Therefore, this probably a tool best reserved for high school and college students.
National Geographic has a daily user-generated photo gallery called the Your Shot Daily Dozen. The Daily Dozen is similar to the BBC's Day in Pictures series. The Daily Dozen contains user-submitted pictures from around the world. Each picture has a small caption containing a description and the location of where the photo was taken. National Geographic has two activities that students can use based on the Daily Dozen pictures, a jigsaw puzzle and a memory game. Applications for Education National Geographic's Daily Dozen has a large number of classroom uses. The images could be used as conversation starters in current events courses, environmental science classes, or photography classes. The images could also be used as story starters for a creative writing class.
Glaxo Smith Kline's Active Science offers fifteen interactive games covering a range of science topics. There are games appropriate for elementary school, middle school, and high school students. The games for younger students appear at the topic of the Active Science list and the games for older students are at the bottom of the list. Active Science is a nice collection of games that unlike a lot of games are not simple drill activities.
The Interactive Periodic Table is a game designed to help chemistry students practice identification of the elements. To play the game students are given some clues about an element's properties. Using those clues the student has to place the element in the correct place on the table.
Applications for Education
Planet Quest provides a good overview of the history of astronomy and space exploration. The culture element could provide an interesting way to engage students who aren't excited about science, but are interested in what people thought at various times in history.
Applications for Education
Science Netlinks provides a collection of lesson plans aligned to the benchmarks for Science Literacy. In addition to lesson plans, Science Netlinks offers a selection of reviewed resource websites for K-12 science teachers.
In Picturing the 1930's students can walk through a virtual museum exploring paintings, documents, music, and film. While walking through the virtual museum students will be greeted by "tour guides" who will explain various aspects of the exhibit. The virtual museum is easy to navigate by using the arrows at the bottom of the screen or clicking through doorways. After exploring the art work in the virtual museum, students can create their own documentary-style film using images, text, and narration using the Picturing the 1930's film editor.
Applications for Education
Google Tutor is a good place to find clear tutorials for improving your and your students' experience with Google's services.
Teachers' Domain offers lesson plans and activities for K-12 divided into five content categories. To help you narrow your search for lessons, the five categories, arts, language arts, science, mathematics, and social studies are divided into subcategories.
Applications for Education
Playing History offers educational games for use in elementary, middle, and high school social studies course. Find a game that matches your curriculum and add it to your classroom website or blog to provide your students with review activity that they can use at home or at school.
Applications for Education
Most of the assessments on Interactivate are appropriate for middle school and high school use. The assessments could be used at the beginning of a course to assess your students' prior knowledge. The assessments could also be used to check for comprehension at the conclussion of a day's lesson.
Applications for Education
Project Look Sharp could be used in social studies, media arts, and science courses. For example the curriculum for endangered species could easily overlap between science and social studies.
Applications for Education
The quizzes are completely customizable and useful for any content area or grade level. You write the questions and the answer choices therefore the content and difficulty of a quiz is up to you to determine. The ability to integrate multimedia clues in your quiz helps to address the needs of a variety of learning styles.
Applications for Education
XP Math is a resource for locating mathematics activities that students can use on their own. The games section allows students to record their scores to measure their progress. The teacher resource and worksheet sections provide mathematics teachers with activities they can use when they can't get their students online.
Students can access free accounts in which they can read tutorial materials and then test their new knowledge on free quizzes and keep track of the items they did and did not know. Teachers can create free accounts to monitor the progress of their students.
Teachers can create accounts for their students and monitor progress to identify their students' strengths and weaknesses. Teachers can also use the site to communicate with students through email.
There are lessons and practice excercises for pre-Algebra, Algebra, Geometry, and Trigonmetry.
Applications for Education
eMathematics looks like a good resource for students to get supplemental mathematics instruction online and may be a good resource for students to use to keep their mathematics skills sharp.
National Geographic's Atlas Jigsaw Puzzles challenge players to assemble the continents as quickly as they can. There are puzzles based on every continent based on political and physical maps. In all there are twenty-three puzzles.
Applications for Education
National Geographic's Atlas Jigsaw Puzzles could be a fun way for students to sharpen their knowledge of world geography one puzzle at a time.
Applications for Education
Most of the videos on NeoK12 come from YouTube which may be a problem for those who work in school districts where YouTube is blocked. If YouTube is not blocked in your school, NeoK12 could be a valuable time-saver in your search for educational videos.
Applications for Education
Xtra Normal could be a great way for students to create animated digital stories for most content areas. This example has students getting ready for a science lesson.
Applications for Education
LMK Life Online is a good place for girls to learn about protecting themselves while online. This is a site that I would recommend to parents who are looking for materials to teach their daughters about online safety.
Applications for Education
Story Top is a good tool for getting students online and creating stories quickly. The user interface is easy to use and offers just enough features to allow students to create digital comics.
The darkroom section of the website contains thirteen categories of images of WWII scientific and technology developments. The timeline on the website allows students to explore the scientific, technological, and political steps in the development of the atomic bomb. The learning activities section gives students the opportunity to learn about and send coded messages.
Applications for Education
This site provides teachers with four lesson plans that incorporate elements of science, math, technology, and history. The lesson plans are appropriate for middle school and high school use. After completing the activities in the lesson plans students can test their knowledge using the quiz in the learning activities section.
Applications for Education
Wikipedia for Schools could be a good reference resource for teachers who are reluctant to allow students to use Wikipedia for research. Being able to download the entire contents enables students to access the information regardless of Internet access
Applications for Education
The World Digital Library is a resource for anyone that teaches history or cultural studies. The wealth of image based resources along with the document based resources makes the WDL appropriate for use with most age groups. Unfortunately, it’s just beginning. The whole library, hosted by the US Library of Congress, has holdings in English from the dates 8000BC and to now has 1170 items. There are only eleven documents from Australia, and three from New Zealand.
Applications for Education
PBS has long been a great source of educational programming and many schools have old video tapes that are in need of renewal.
Some of the longer videos, like those from NOVA, are broken into chapters which makes it easier to show just a portion of video to a class rather than an entire episode.
Amazing Space.
Applications for Education
The activities are appropriate for use in middle school and upper elementary school grades and there are suggested lesson plans with each interactive activity.
Applications for Education
Stop Disasters could be used by geography teachers and Earth science teachers and in order to be successful in this game students have to have knowledge of geography concepts and Earth science concepts.
Applications for Education
The Wild Classroom is an informative place for students to explore biology concepts. The lesson plan section of The Wild Classroom is sparse right now, therefore The Wild Classroom is seeking contributions from teachers.
Applications for Education
Caption Tube could be great tools for foreign language teachers, ESL/ EFL teachers, and teachers of students with hearing impairments. Foreign Language teachers could have students find their favorite short YouTube videos or TeacherTube videos to transcribe into the language that they are studying.
Applications for Education
Visualizing Cultures could be used at a wide range of grade levels. The essays could be used in a high school history class and the visual narratives could be used in a middle school or possibly elementary school class.
provides model for students to use as they create visual narratives of their own. According to the website, Visualizing Cultures has plans to add visual narratives about China.
ProCon presents short articles and news quotes from both sides of the "core question" and provides students with a balanced look at controversial topics such as Illegal Immigration, Euthenasia, bailouts of big corporations and categrorizes topics as Business, Politics, Science, Health, Law, Religion, Sex & Gender, and Sports.
Applications for Education
ProCon's mission statement claims that its purpose is to "promote critical thinking skills, education, and informed citizenship." It does a good job of providing balanced information that could help students make informed decisions, and could be a good reference for students who are participating in debates or writing persuasive essays on controversial topics.
If you are a Windows user you can download, for free, the Fling the Teacher Content Generator which allows you to create your own versions of Fling the Teacher.
Applications for Education
The quiz games on Fling the Teacher are primarily about topics in European History and you can locate quizzes by topic or by age group.
World Digital Library
The World Digital Library will launch on April 21, 2009.The World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.
Applications for Education
PE Zone is a good resource for physical education and health teachers. PE Zone also offers a list of blogs and RSS feeds to help teachers find even more resources for physical education.
Applications for Education
The Physics Classroom could be a very good resource for high school physics teachers and their students. The animations in particular could be very helpful to students that learn concepts better when they can see those concepts in action.
Applications for Education
Shmoop's literature guides provide good depth of information without providing so much depth that students would be tempted to just use the review guides instead of actually doing their assigned readings
Applications for Education
World of Teaching could be a great website to have up your sleeve when you don't have time to build a slideshow or they could also be good resources to look through for ideas for creating your own slideshows.
There are also some convenient features like integrated search for images, videos, and websites and an integrated multilingual dictionary.
Click the "remove ads" link and all of that advertising disappears.
Applications for Education
Lite Type could be a great resource for foreign language teachers and students. It removes the struggle of trying to figure out which keys do what when trying to type in a foreign language.
Applications for Education
Dr. Saul's Biology in Motion provides fun and educational activities and animations appropriate for middle school and high school science classes.
Applications for Education
Mind 360 could be a good website for students to use during a downtime in your class or during a study hall period. The games themselves might be difficult to build a lesson plan around, but the skills that students could develop while playing the games do have value.
Applications for Education
Overall, the games are great for elementary school and middle school students. Review games keep students engaged in learning.
The VoiceThread for Education wiki has many excellent ideas for and examples of using VoiceThread in education. There is something for everyone in the VoiceThread for Education wiki, even mathematics teachers.
On Board the Titanic - Virtual Vield Trip
Applications for Education
On Board the Titanic is a good resource for elementary and middle school students learning about the Titanic. It could be used as part of a larger lesson on early 20th century history. After taking the virtual field trip an extension activity could be to have students invent a character and write their own story about the Titanic.
Snag Films is a great place to find full-length documentary films. The site has a National Geographic section offering more than 60 full-length documentaries for free viewing. All of these videos can be watched on the Snag Films website or "snagged" and embedded into your blog or website.
Applications for Education
A good classroom project could be to have students create videos to contribute to Next Vista. All videos can be embedded into your blog or website. The videos can also be downloaded directly from Next Vista. The download option is great for teachers that work in schools that have very restrictive web filters.
If you're looking for other mathematics activities, check out this general math page which is divided into fourteen categories including fractions, flashcards, integers, telling time, algebra, and geometry.
Applications for Education
The games are best suited to use by elementary school students although there may be some cases in which middle school students could benefit from the games.
The Eyeballing Game is an interactive visual estimation game. Players are presented with a drawing or a line segment, angle, or shape. Players are then given a task like "find the spot equidistant to all sides" or "bisect the angle."
Applications for Education
Both of the games mentioned above could be good mathematics practice activities that students can use independently. Both activities are worth considering as resources to link to your class blog or wiki.
The interactive activities require students to read sentences and identify errors. In some of the activities students have to correct errors in a sentence. Each interactive activity is accompanied by a handout on which students can record their scores and measure their progress.
Applications for Education
The design and content of Grammar Bytes makes it a good resource for students and teachers.
Applications for Education
Teaching With TED is a good place to find thought provoking videos and discussion questions for use in your classroom. Teaching With TED is a wiki so if you have ideas about teaching with TED Talks submit your suggestions.
The Periodic Table of Visualisation Methods
Applications for Education
The Periodic Table of Visualization Methods could be a great reference when you're trying to create graphic organizers appropriate for your content and students. This is also a great reference for students trying to find the best way to present and share their knowledge and or research findings.
Applications for Education
The live chat option could be very useful for those times when your students are at home looking at an assignment you've posted and need clarification. You could chat with them about the assignment or they could chat with one of their classmates about the assignment.
Applications for Education
Provides teachers with a tool for teaching lessons about media bias, accuracy in news reporting, and global perspectives of an event.
The terms of service require users to be at least thirteen years old. Therefore, this probably a tool best reserved for high school and college students.
Applications for Education
National Geographic's Daily Dozen has a large number of classroom uses. The images could be used as conversation starters in current events courses, environmental science classes, or photography classes. The images could also be used as story starters for a creative writing class.